"Iovation picked Cassandra to be able to scale their services out and grow them linearly both in terms of scale and predictable cost growth... With Oracle we had stability issues once the data sets got really huge and that’s been great with Cassandra."

Iovation’s a service that other customers will incorporate into their business to help detect fraud and it works in real time trying to find fraudulent accounts. You probably use Iovation services indirectly through other customers’ websites. As the device reputation authority, we’re able to expose and predict trustworthiness from a consumer’s interactions across the broad online landscape, including retail, financial services, telecommunications, social networking, logistics, dating, gaming, and gambling.

After migrating to Apache Cassandra from Oracle in 2013, Iovation has increased traffic volume by 600% with faster processing times – all at an 8X cost savings.

Oracle pain, Cassandra gain

I’ve been at iovation about three years and just before I arrived they integrated Cassandra 0.6 into the mix to do some of the real time traffic for a lot of the device recognition applications. Since, we’ve used it in a couple of our other services we have several clusters of Cassandra 1.1.6. Right now we’re using it primarily for our real time services and fast responses and that sort of thing and it’s been great.

Iovation was primarily an Oracle relational database shop before they got into Cassandra, prior to me joining. Iovation picked Cassandra to be able to scale their services out and grow them linearly both in terms of scale and predictable cost growth. In addition to that, one of the motivators for replacing Oracle was the ease of maintenance and growth. With Oracle we had stability issues once the data sets got really huge and that’s been great with Cassandra.

Multi-data center & vnodes

We have three of our own data centers so it’s really a private cloud kind of scenario so three data centers with data replicated in each place and we have three clusters in production, one of them is a 24-node cluster with eight in each data center for our reputation service and then we have a 12-node cluster with four nodes in each data center for one of our services and we have another one, a little smaller one for velocity based things. It’s two in each data center. I think they’re all on Cassandra 1.1.6 and we’re pretty excited to dig into 1.2.

In 1.2 one of the big things is the ability to grow the cluster without having to double it; right now we have this paradigm where if we want to grow a cluster the easiest thing is to double it just to get the tokens to keep from having to move around our data. With virtual nodes, added in 1.2, and the token assignments we’re excited to be able to grow the cluster by single and piecemeal nodes and by a couple machines rather than double it. That’s one very exciting thing.

Trust in Cassandra

It’s really nice to see the stability just gets better and better with each release and every time a new release comes out I’m really impressed with the stability and simplicity that’s introduced from the previous versions, it’s been great.

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COMPANY OVERVIEW

iovation’s device reputation database is the largest in the world containing 15 million reports of fraud and protects more than 10 million transactions per day, stopping 200,000 fraudulent activities per day.